RIPENING SEASONS

Issue #12, February 1996

Part 1 (of 3);

Have a heart . . .
Mine!

You may not actually get this by
Valentines Day, but it is February 10th as I begin it, at 7:45 in the
morning . . . and I have just seen the rising sun's first appearance
for the year in my window! I'd have caught it yesterday, but there
were clouds on the horizon, and the angle of rising takes it out of
my view within five minutes, at this early stage. But it was right
on schedule, even to the minute, for I noted it last year. My
personal solstice...almost seven weeks after the real one.

For many of you, this issue follows right on the heels of an
earlier one. For others, it will be the first you've seen in many
months. This is the third issue that goes out to everyone on my
mailing list, and it's so close to the one before because I had to
try and catch the Valentines date: the first anniversary of this
noble taskmaster. How I managed twelve issues in a year's time
&emdash; in such a packed year &emdash; is much beyond me. Not quite
a monthly, but I never intended that in the first place. I thought
I'd do well to get half that number up and out.

But it was some year! As I'm sure all of you will agree. When
Ripening Seasons began, I had absolutely no notion that my
world would go international (intercyber!) within weeks, and swamp me
with more resources and instant connections than I could possibly
keep up with. Getting a new computer was one of those "I should live
so long" possibilities &emdash; though I did anticipate the modest
acquisition of a modem. But the old sweetheart Mac I was
using never have given me Netscape, which brings the Web fully to
life. And needless to say, the concept of a Home page, a Web site,
was like something from Jupiter.

It only goes to show you how much mystery resides in just the span
of a year. The future, at any time of your life, can be a magical
place! If you are open...which is to say, not entirely committed to
being who you are today. Being "who you are today," in some
steadfast fashion, might seem to hold a security advantage, but the
pure fact is that it slowly becomes rancid. Bet you never thought of
it that way, did you? But we are, after all, organic creatures.

Anyway, it is the anniversary point of a startling year, for me,
and a two-fold occasion of glory &emdash; for I have, now, the
pleasure of inviting one and all to my Web site! It is UP and OPEN.
All you need is the address, which is in the box on the back yellow
page of this and every future issue of Ripening Seasons.
Well, excuse me...you also need a computer and modem. This is the
place, I think &emdash; the very moment, in a broad sense &emdash;
when David Spangler's prophetic words of two decades ago become
reality.

In his book, Revelation: the Birth of a New Age, published
in 1976, he wrote: "New energies, new life, new civilization, two
worlds, old and new, separating until they 'perceive each other no
more'..." (italics are his). I never envisioned it in this
particular way, but there is an obvious level of separation going on
in our world now: the modem-haves and the modem-havenots. The
visionaries who can see what is taking place in this millennial
blossoming, and the conservative multitude (like me of a year ago?)
whose vision remains trapped in what they know how to cope with.

I don't mean to sound judgemental, here, for we are each entitled
to our own reality &emdash; but it is hard to escape the fact that my
world of richest involvement is shifting, at this point, and is never
likely to be the same as it was. I'll continue to put out
Ripening Seasons in its present format &emdash; which I happen
to be quite fond of &emdash; but it's also going out there in
cyberspace, together with its older siblings... and such a vast array
of 'cousins,' so to speak, that anyone who touches base with me at my
Web site will shortly have 25 years of my developmental writing at
their personal disposal. That is no poor resource, for anyone
intrigued by my path! And no shallow method of connecting with such
an audience.

So for me, the millennium is here and now: the
corner has been turned. I no longer live in a contained apartment
among a host of 'old folks' to whom I can't relate, but out there in
a virtual world called cyberspace, where the flow has become &emdash;
this very month &emdash; a two-way interchange. The door is
now open for free passage in both directions.

Shifting, now, to a slightly different but somewhat related
subject, it is time to sum the year's passage in more down-to-earth
terms: the cost-benefit report of a year's worth of Ripening
Seasons.

Up to this issue, there have been eleven of them, totaling 54
pages of text, and put out at a cost precisely assessed at $6.72 for
the full year's worth. Or it averages 61 cents per issue. I provide
this calculation &emdash; based entirely on out-of-pocket costs, with
no other 'overhead' or any profit figured in &emdash; strictly for
your information, for there is no price put on Ripening
Seasons. Well, none of a monetary and chargeable nature, but
there are certain ramifications that I want you to be aware of.

The first one is that I hope to have the entire cost of it
covered by donation. Now, let me emphasize, here, that even the
donation basis is not a requirement for receiving Ripening
Seasons, but merely the means by which costs are met. As it
happens, I've received $426.36 in donations, up to now, which
averages to $38.76 per issue, which is enough to cover the cost of 63
copies of each issue. That's including postage, so it applies only
to those that go out in the mail, which presently runs at some
average close to 65 or 70 copies. So you can see that I'm not quite
'making it' &emdash; even without taking into account the 10 to 20
copies outside of those mailed. But it is, after all, my own
correspondence, so it doesn't particularly bother me, as long as I
stay within sighting distance of the beginning of black ink.

The only potential problem is that the donations that assure the
continuance of this effort have been provided by only thirty, or no
more than half of those who receive any given issue, and barely the
ratio that I think can support the present level. Not a plea, but it
could affect the number of freebies I'm able to send out on a regular
basis. That, of course, is my problem (freebies), not yours...but
just so you know.

The second ramification is that something in the way
of an expressed desire to receive Ripening Seasons is
necessary for being a regular recipient. That would seem obvious and
reasonable, but it has to be stated to avoid the embarrassment
between friends when I suddenly stop sending someone's Ripening
Seasons, seemingly without reason, after having once initiated
their delivery on some spur of the moment impulse to share. I can
just as easily have a spur of the moment impulse to desist! (with no
ill feelings implied). I do not, after all, want to find myself in
the strange situation of sending an appeal for anyone's continued
expression of interest, when they never sent it in the first
place.

The third ramification is somewhat similar: I need to have
feedback or response. It doesn't have to be frequent &emdash; once
or twice a year is good enough. But I need to know that Ripening
Seasons, when sent gratis, is part of a dialogue, and not just me
laying out my headtrips. It was started as a medium for responding
to correspondence, and it remains essentially that. If co-responding
occasionally just isn't your thing, you can always (now) get online
and read Ripening Seasons without it, to your heart's
content.

This issue #12 is going out to everyone I know, both as an
announcement of my new Web site, and as a reconnecting reminder that
Ripening SeasonsIS, that it's thriving (in a sense),
and that it's available. You can know your status on my mailing list
by looking at the address label. If there is no capital letter (or
no coding at all) in the lower right corner, it means this is a
one-time copy, and if you want to keep receiving it I need to hear it
from you. If there is a capital letter, here's what it stands
for:

D means you've donated sometime within the past
year. Most donations were made before midyear, and I ask now that
you consider donating again &emdash; with the proviso that it is
entirely optional (but much appreciated).

E represents an existing publication exchange between
us. There aren't very many of these, and they require a true
exchange to remain in effect &emdash; which I mention because a
couple of them are on rather tenuous ground right now, if they are
to be sustained on this basis.

F stands for freebies &emdash; these are the 'spur of
the moment' recipients who need to pay particular attention to my
second and third ramifications, above.

H is the special category of host &emdash; during my
recent travels through Oregon and California. With this issue,
please note that I am retiring the host category. Those of you on
it must become either D's or F's if you wish to continue receiving
Ripening Seasons on a regular basis.

I need to stress the fact that these letter-keys are for receipt
on a regular basis. For I still follow the original
correspondence premise that I began with: but for occasional
exception, I respond to all personal letters with a current or past
issue of Ripening Seasons.

If all of this seems a strange way to run a business, just
remember that it's not a business. You think I want to get
entangled in tax forms and license rigmarole?

Part 2 (of 3):

Deconstructing
Morality

One of the more marvelous things
that can be said for aging is that it's a wonderfully liberating
experience. My most usual awareness of it is a kind of grand and
glorious sensation that arrives with almost every morning, when
energy is fresh and the mind is open. Double that: OPEN: Not
constrained by fences or obligation or some damning commitment to
"who I am supposed to be," made years ago to spouse, society, or even
to myself! I'm not talking, here, of relationship vows, you
understand, but to the subtext that often grows from them, and from
whatever engagement we have with life. A subtext ribbed and
cross-ribbed with beliefs, values and convictions that solidify over
the years into a virtual prison.

When we think of prisons and prisoners, there is only the concept
of physical incarceration, maybe sometimes extended to such as the
imprisonment of poverty or physical handicap. But it would not be
amiss to say that we spend most of our lives in the chains and toil
of particular belief systems - anything from our religious
foundations and national pride, down to the certitudes of what
"really happened" in history. Growing old is - or it can be - the
growing awareness of contradictions in every such structure, and the
consequent release from their necessity.

I was really conscious of this, just the other day, in a
class discussion at the U. It's not a philosophy class, although one
might think so from the drift of this one. Starting from somewhere in
the realm of personal identity and how it is expressed in the online
encounter, we found ourselves drawn into tangents of post-modern
deconstructionist theory - or in more down-to-earth terms, the recent
taking-down of structural certitudes in virtually every field of
inquiry. Not sufficiently down-to-earth for you? Okay, the shattering
of everything we think we "know," or have always taken for
granted.

I am comfortable with this, as should be gathered from my opening
paragraphs. And I would expect to find it comfortable territory in an
exploratory graduate seminar, whatever the subject. Maybe it should
be sufficient that it was open for discussion - but I found myself
the strongest protagonist for the concepts I've been expressing,
facing not only fellow-student resistance, but that of the fairly
young prof, himself.

The point he stood on - admittedly a difficult one to challenge -
was that if you remove all the certitudes, you eventually come to a
place of complete moral relativism, where there is no shared ground
of ethical conviction. In other words, how could one ever argue the
sanctity of the environment (or anything at all) after having
disposed of all and any standards?

He would have been pleased to hear from me, I'm sure, that I
arrived at such a precipice, and had to back off from it, in the
course of my own soul search more than twenty years ago. It is not so
simply told, though, for it wasn't the end of my realizations. But
let me paint the landscape, so you'll understand how I arrived there,
and where I went from there.

This was back in the early `70s, when I was fresh into
exploring eastern ways of looking at life. I had only recently
discovered the concept that our pain and struggle derives not from
what we can't have, but from the very desire to have it. It made
sense, but it challenged me to the very core, for my life had always
revolved around goals and ambition - as did everyone else's. What's
more, the very notion - coming from the east as it did - would seem
to account for the placid, passive way of being that I had always
associated with orientals: they have no ambition, and therefore lead
drab and passionless lives. (A racist oversimplification, of course,
but that was my take on the Asian personality, for many years.)

So I struggled with the whole idea - realizing its truth, but not
wanting the consequent loss of purpose in my life that must
`naturally' follow. Michael Phillips recently wrote to me about his
discovery that people constitute a "replicable dichotomy" around the
issue of having more vs. less. A replicable dichotomy is a division
which is so absolute that one can make successful predictions around
it: the same group of people will always want more (than they've
got), and just the reverse for those who prefer to live on the sparse
side. Well, I was caught up in the replicable dichotomy, registering
in terms of ambition: I could not see that life was worth living,
without it.

In trying to deal with this collision of belief systems, I had to
examine my convictions about the value of ambition. In effect, by
today's terminology, I had to deconstruct this value by exploring its
roots and consequences - looking at it simply as a cultural artifact.
I remember my shock, one day, when telling a close friend about my
great exploits in the world of programming - a friend to whom the
entire realm of computers seemed rather pointless - and then hearing
her complete dismissal of the whole thing with a peremptory "So
what?"

It hit me like a rogue ocean wave from the backside. "So
what!" I had never quite thought of my accomplishments in those
terms. But so what, indeed! What on earth difference did it make? And
likewise, my ambitions - who was I trying to please by what I
struggled for in my world? And if it be me, what part of me
was it? What about the rest of me?

Bit by bit, I took this thing called ambition apart, and saw it as
a cornerstone in the world I had structured. It would be rash to say
that this was the first wedge into a frozen set of value assumptions
that had become my way-of-life burden over the years, but it was a
biggie and took me a long way down the trail. For I could hardly stop
with that one realization. Ultimately, I was questioning everything I
had ever believed.

And then, one day, I realized that this business could be carried
too far...that I could dissolve whatever ground my life stood on. In
fact, the very realization made the substance of my firmament woozily
uncertain, and I had to `stand off,' as it were, and look very
closely at this. Where was it going to end? This is what Mac, my
professor at the U, was talking about.

Around that same time, I was also engaged in useful
philosophical dialogue with Chuck Garrigues, a wonderful soul who is
no longer with us, and he told me about what he called one of the
profound turning-points of his life - when his entire momentum had
bogged down for a five-year wrestle with what might seem to most an
almost trivial issue: whether a tree falling in a forest, with no one
there to hear it, makes any sound at all. He said it had totally hung
him up, for it raised questions that went to the very heart of
reality itself. Finding no persuasive basis for one answer or the
other, Chuck finally freed himself from the enigma by arbitrarily
deciding that the falling tree did make a noise, whether anyone was
there to hear it or not. And he got on with his life.

It seems something he might have done a lot sooner, but Big Life
Issues do not that easily resolve. Despite their often superficial
appearance, they represent large scale internal shake-ups underway,
and require sometimes a re-examining of one's entire life.

I did a lot of reflection, myself, on Chuck's tale, for it had a
bearing on my own inner search, and finally came to the conclusion
that Chuck had made the wrong choice! He had opted for a conservative
resolution, which perhaps stabilized his life but also drew a kind of
'line of farthest-out exploration.' He might have made an
analysis that opened the gate he chose to leave shut:

Sound is merely a wave-length function of energy, that the
auditory mechanism translates for our perception.

Similarly, our eyes translate other energy wave-lengths into a
spectrum of color for our visual perception.

Now imagine: what would ensue for someone in the forest if
their eyes could handle the wavelengths that ordinarily get
transposed into sound?

My guess is that it could be a rainbow display of brilliant color
whenever a tree should fall. This radical tack, more than being just
a clever argument, opens a whole new realm of the possible - for it
grants the reality that energy is independent of the translating
structure, which means its manifestational potential is not only
unpredictable but unlimited!

This has taken us a bit afield from where our present
discussion began, but I think I can frame its relevance. The
interchange with Chuck demonstrated for me that what we now call
deconstruction has two significant characteristics: 1) it opens gates
for new (and virtually unlimited) possibilities by re-orienting our
projective consciousness; and 2) it establishes the legitimacy of
consciously re-directing our path, or reconstituting the ground from
which we organize such re-direction.

Here's what happened with my east/west dilemma of twenty-odd years
ago: By risking the dissolution of my reality groundwork, I
discovered that it exists only in consonance with a belief system.
There may be some "untouchable reality," but unless I choose
to seriously test it I cannot be sure where its boundaries are. My
only option is to approach every facet of it with doubt and
skepticism, relying on my own experience to validate such borders as
I bump up against; all else is justifiably suspect (as to its true
level of reality).

What this has meant, in real-life terms, is a discovered ability
to shift my 'operative reality' by pursuing a pattern of activity
that ties into a slightly different range of beliefs or values. I can
only be general about this, because any instance that challenged your
own sense of reality would simply be dismissed out of hand; while if,
on the other hand, you shared the perception, it would seem not
strange at all. But I, myself, have observed my reality shift, and
thus realize the potency of pure belief, and at least a hint of the
extent to which it can be shaped to one's personal utility - the
outer world's reality notwithstanding.

Similarly - and this is what I'd like to have said to my prof - it
is quite possible to live in a strictly personal frame of moral
certitude even after having reached the conclusion that it has no
more substance than that which belief imparts - and it is also
possible, in this context, to accept the legitimacy of a moral code
that is antithetical to our own.

Thus, the possible dismissal of a uniform moral framework...the
introduction of a `moral relativism' that could be liberating
without threatening the community's residual shared values or its
cohesion in the face of significant levels of moral difference. If
this requires the supreme sacrifice of learning to live among certain
attitudes alien to our own, it might yet be a more workable
resolution than putting our energy into the endless agony of
attempting to squelch them.

Strangely, it seems to be what this country was originally all
about.

Part 3 of this issue was a paper put out by John
Perry Barlow challenging the Telecom Reform Act of 1996. It seemed
important at the time to pass this along to my readers. But for
present purposes it does not sufficiently relate to matters on this
site, and is, in any case, probably accessible
elsewhere.